This past Monday, I made a peach coffee cake. I often bake on weekends, but had decided to squeeze this effort in on a weeknight instead, so it would be as fresh as possible for the staff meeting after school on Tuesday.

This cake recipe is old; it’s a recipe my mother has had for time out of mind, one she’s been making since the 1970s. I don’t know where the recipe came from originally, and I’ll certainly never ask her now that we’re estranged. But I have very clear memories of watching her make this cake, painstakingly, many times over the years. This turned out to be fortuitous, as the recipe itself as written leaves a lot to be desired. It’s scrawled on a 3×5 recipe index card, with my mother’s cramped handwriting squeezing as much detail in as she could fit, but my memory had to fill in a lot of blanks, especially with the method.

I don’t have too much in the way of family heirlooms, but one thing I do have is the Bible. That’s what I grew up calling my mother’s recipe book. It is actually an old photo album, the kind where you peel the plastic away from the cardboard page to stick photos – or in this case, recipes, many handwritten by a smattering of different important people from our lives, others clipped from magazines across the decades. It is spiral bound, falling apart, the covers long gone, permanently smelling of stale cigarette smoke. I think when I was a kid, we held it together with a heavy duty vacuum rubber band (are those even a thing anymore?).

I will readily admit that most of my mother’s recipes – whether they can be found in this Bible or they’re just in my head from over 25 years of watching her cook and eating her food – are wonderful. A lot of what I make tastes better than when she made it, and I have theories about why. One big theory is that since I don’t smoke like a chimney (or at all), my senses of taste and smell aren’t deadened and I can therefore season things far better. Another theory is that I’ve learned some tips and tricks over the years from Food Network and such, to naturally improve upon the originals. Yet another one, frankly, is that I pour so much unadulterated heart and soul into my cooking, surely that comes out in the taste. Good food hits different when it’s cooked with pure love (as opposed to love with judgment, or strings attached), and that’s a hill I’ll die on if I have to. Anyway – this peach coffee cake recipe is no exception. It came out as good, if not even better, than I remember her cake tasting. Like lots of old recipes, it is all done entirely by hand – no stand mixer, not even a hand mixer. I took no shortcuts, though I probably could have. The butter gets cut into the dry ingredients using a pair of butter knives; I even used a six-quart pot as my mixing bowl, because that was what I remember my mother always used (because that was the largest vessel she had to make such things in, besides her big sauce pot).

Using this Bible, making things like this cake, is always fraught with bittersweetness for me. I love cooking and baking more than almost anything else in my life, especially when I’m doing it for others and especially when I’m making dishes I grew up eating. Generally speaking, that means Italian food, as my mother is first generation American-born Italian. Both her parents came to the U.S. from Sicily, though her mother’s side of the family first went to Argentina before coming here. There’s a beloved empanada-like dish my mother used to make all the time, which we always called pastellas, and I believe the recipe must originate from their time in Argentina. I’ve been wanting to try my hand at that recipe for a long time, but have been too afraid of the onslaught of memories which would ensue.

There are some spots in my psyche that still hurt too much to poke. I struggle to accept nostalgia at face value; so much of my past is watermarked with pain, and it’s become a double-edged sword to cook old family recipes for others who have no such connections with me from that timeframe. It’s a window into my youth, feeding my friends and chosen family some homemade meatballs, or peach coffee cake – a window they need, in order to see that part of me at all. When there’s so much that’s difficult to explain, impossible to talk about – the food does it for me, in a way that somehow makes it okay.

My colleagues at school gratefully devoured this peach coffee cake, for the record. They gave me such rave reviews that I may just make another one sooner rather than later. This week was the first time I’d tried that recipe in years, not since before the falling-out with my mother. Just entertaining the idea of not waiting years to make it again feels healing to me, much like the act of making the cake in itself. Less bitter, more sweetness.

Healing comes in unexpected forms sometimes. Making marinara sauce has absolutely become a routine therapeutic exercise for me, for example. I certainly hadn’t expected healing to take the form of peach coffee cake this week, but, I’m glad it did. Who knew that finding inner peace could be so delicious?